Postscript Re: Sarah

I don’t mind saved drafts, they are vital to the writer’s journey to psychic wholeness; for the alchemy of maturity must be performed alone, in private; however, lately, I have been saving too many drafts in what I can only perceive as an attempt to avoid writing about what I have been meaning to write about: my Sarah – not Sarah, whose loan on my heart is long overdue and accruing fines (As evinced by my last two poems) but my Sarah: her doppelgänger ghost, whom I will always love. Because my Sarah never left. Yes, the Sarah who left a year ago is unknown to me – and I dead to her. It’s a ghost story all around.

But I have to tell it or my memories will be my Shutter Island, a personal abyss. But even the darkness of her ghost wasn’t always that dark. Just sad. Me walking up the hill alone, bringing back a bottle of tequila and a few IPAs, so I could hang out with her ghost and commiserate. Got shitty drunk and listened to the Lana Del Rey catalogue till I was gone enough to feel that both Lana and Sarah were here with me. It was just a girl’s night: a painfully sad, massively lonely, self-deluded girl’s night.

This was one of the stories I recounted in a long letter I wrote her, after I got sober alone here in the mountains. The handwritten letter ended up taking up most of a spiral notebook. I never sent it. Nor the letters I typed to her parents. I just couldn’t carry the truth to her: that I would always love her fiercely.

I couldn’t give her that gift in the face of being perceived as absolutely valueless by her: worthless. She never directly told me to get fucked, but that certainly would have been the kind thing to do. Go back and read some of my poems, it’s a fucking sad story. And she had the right to disown me in the end. She was justified – but not in her means. Still, I wanted her friendship, I wanted to be able to safely love her forever. But it was not safe for me. Is not. I still have the mind-mushing pills they gave me. A kind of break-in-case-of-emergency parachute, which I think I’ll never need, because I’ll never be writing her songs and sending them to her again like I did:

Baby baby come over
You know that I’m sober,
I know that we’re over
…
It’s a three hour drive, up the I-5, don’t say you’re tired,
I know you’re lyin… I know your line

No, I will never look to her again for an iota of love. But I wanted to. She knew. I told her repeatedly, when we last talked, in an emotionally strained tone of voice:

“It didn’t have to be like this!”

And it fucking didn’t.

Of course, forgiveness is accepting that the past could not have been any different. And I have accepted that Sarah did not wish to remain my friend; I have accepted that we are not friends – will not be friends. In fact, my animus toward her is that of the person who checked themselves into the psych hospital following her refusal to see me last Christmas after we had been apart five months…. But with Sarah, it is all my fault. And some people will never apologize because they will never feel they have anything to be sorry for in light of all you did to them.

And even if I were wrong and Sarah contacted me to tell me I am wrong and that she does care for me and wanted to mend the fence today or in seven years, I would politely tell her to get fucked. Because I am a gentleman. And I don’t fuck with people’s emotions.

So, in regards to Sarah, whatever matters to her in the world, whoever she is, I have no clue. In my subjective perception, she wore the mask I projected onto her from day one, and I never feel I got really far behind it, other than to see near the end that I was really out-gamed and that my mask was not a fit at all.

As a wise person once said, “Pick someone who will make a good ex.” Had I been cogent of this and other things, there would have been no Daniella, no Shannon, no Sarah. But it also ought be said that I was a better ex than I was a longterm partner for any of them. But, from 34 year old me, and from all the poems I have written to my formative loves: fuck you all. Srs fr fr.

My inner-child just high-fived me for that one… but hey. I really had no backbone hitherto. I can tell story after story of my putting up with things that I would have noped the fuck out on from three miles away today. I see you Shannon, not staying with me at my new apartment in the shores on my 27th birthday. Yes that was seven years ago. But fuck did that suck. And a ton of my actions in my relationships fucking sucked too. Where alcohol was always the common factor in my failings, perhaps the common factor in their’s was the vitriol I caused them to feel for me. I have no problem taking responsibility. I’ll take all the blame. I have.

Obviously this isn’t about Sarah. It’s about me.

But I would be lying if I told you my Sarah was not a big part of who I am. And I would be lying if I said my love for Sarah Sarah didn’t make me hate her fucking guts. But you would have had to miss her like me to know how that feels, you would have to love her like I do. And I don’t think anyone knows how deep that love runs.

I always carried the torch. For all of them. Two years after my first love of five years cheated on me and ghosted, I took her back, when, in Gatsbian fashion, I became financially successful in order to do so. The romance is not lost on me. But it was on her.

I carried the torch for all of them. The night Sarah and I met, I said to her, “I thought my story was over.” Sarah was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

As had been Shannon and Daniella before her. In a way, it was all the same “eternal woman” I was seeking.

But with Sarah there was more magic because I was older. Fuck I loved her. The morning I woke up next to her, I said to myself, “Is this the girl you are gonna marry,” and it wasn’t a question. Sarah. Her hair. Her skin. Her spirit. The energy of her consciousness was my favorite I had ever encountered. Her skin.

I recall listening to countless plays of an incredibly poetic Yung Lean song titled ‘Agony’, which told his own story of recovering after a stay in the psyche ward. It felt like I wrote it.

“Isolation caved in,
I adore you, the sound of your skin”

I have it on now, and it still resounds – minus the “take a pill and go to sleep” part, though the pill would help me sleep – were I less inclined to smoke a QP a month of cannabis instead.

But Sarah. I told her in my letter that she would be the queen of my heart forever. I even have a kind of Jungian model of the space she occupies in the canon of my love, based on the four stages of anima development.

She is Mary. After her came Sophie, the goddess of wisdom, whom – instead of projecting – I have personified as Lore, my Self. Not that binary Jungian models for male and female contrasexual inner development are entirely valid in an emerging post-gender world, but my own anima (inner feminine) development seems to have followed a series of stages culminating in the individuation of the feminine in myself via a trans non-binary femme identify.

Further, I could not project love any further outward beyond Sarah. Where she ended I began.

Another anecdote from the unsent book letter I wrote Sarah was about how much I felt like her after she left, like I was her. Drinking ginger tea. She gave me the first admirable model I had ever known of how to be an independent human. This is so painful to even write. But fuck. I would just drink ginger tea and listen to Norwegian Wood because it reminded me of her.

There is so much more from this last year alone, but suffice to say, I feel sexy in my bike shorts because Sarah was sexy in her’s. And I evoke her spirit constantly in my conscious mind in myriad little ways. And even then, I find it so easy to pine for her. I feel sick to my stomach now. The silence kills. Alexa play “To Zion” by Trevor Hall.

So, do I think Sarah is “cool”, no. I think she is amazing, but she is not cool at all. She’s too cool for me.

Gah, what do I even do with all this. I guess now I decide whether to save it as a draft or to press the little publish button.

I fear I have been too callous, and my expression of love and gratitude too tame, but Jung said perfection lie in the tension of opposites.

And I’ll have to love Sarah for the rest of my life. I don’t think I will ever not miss her or hate her for it.

It’s so fucked but what can I do. I spent this year alone. I went through it all on my own, and only I’ll ever know the dark days of not having a single friend in the world to talk to. There were eight months in the mountains when I didn’t even have a car. I went fucking through it.

So excuse me if I have lost the will to project love outside again, but I have gained the ability to feel it within, from myself, and that’s worth as many fuck yous as my inner child feels entitled to.

And I hope I never feel the need to write about Sarah again for many years. As the sheer amount of emotional energy I have expended on my love for her has been enough for a lifetime. The letter was never meant to be sent. But this Postscript was.

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1 thought on “Postscript Re: Sarah”

WoW! I read every word, I feel you, this is gorgeous and emotive and such a great part of your development – thank you for sharing.
This is why I write so someone can connect to my raw outpouring. Stay strong, you will soon see where Sarah fits in and trust me there is always something better. It will never be the same but the experiences all equate to the learnings of ‘You’
Enjoy the lessons and again thank you for sharing 🧡